


the best parts of knowing

by yonderdarling



Series: the best parts of knowing [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Death in Heaven coda, F/M, M/M, References to Genocide, because lbr here their lines weren't even subtext, mostly post-2005 Doctor/Master unfortunately, references to grief, the doctor and the master break my heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-24 22:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2599277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yonderdarling/pseuds/yonderdarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor tries to help Clara cope with her loss. No one left alive can help him cope with his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the best parts of knowing

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to get all my Doctor/Master feelings out after the most recent finale; these two will always break my heart.

"Clara, about the M - about Missy," he says, but she turns and looks at him with tear-filled eyes and hunched shoulders and pale face and slides down the wall of the TARDIS like her bones have melted.  
  
Later.  
  
Later, or never.  
  
Never, hopefully.  
  
He shuts the doors behind them and sends the TARDIS spinning off to Clara's flat. This time he makes the tea as Clara sits, silent and big wet eyes and trembling chin as she sobs and cries because she didn't do that, after Danny died, because she was waiting and plotting and planning how she was going to bring him back. And she did, she was so close and then he, good soldier man, had to go away again. She cries and he puts a blanket round her shoulders, and then he finds Danny's jumper in her room and gives that to her and she cries harder and quieter than before.  
  
And Danny Pink might be dead (if he hasn't picked up on the bracelet, but PE is a smart man and a brave man) but he's 70% sure Gallifrey isn't and there's a fire thrumming under his skin (wrong word wrong word wrong word) and he wants to go look but she's still crying and he wants to stay and he needs to stay.  
  
 _You know the best part about knowing? Not telling you. (They never know, they never find out, he keeps it so well hidden kept it so well hidden all these years the only planet with the records that dispute him is gone and dead forever, or is it?)_  
  
He was a dad once, and a husband once (still) and a friend always always always. He makes her another cup of tea and what vaguely resembles a sandwich and then when the sky is dark but the streetlights burn bright outside, helps her into bed and tucks her shoes into her wardrobe and washes the dishes.  
  
 _He loves playing with Earth girls._  
  
Tries to wash the dishes, because he has to sit for a minute and stare out the window and watch what passes for the stars in the city in Britain in the 21st century and he doesn't cry. He's cried enough tears for Gallifrey and the Time Lords and his children and wives and husbands and brothers and sisters and parents and grandchildren and nieces and nephews to fill oceans, and yet when he touches his face as the clock tells him it's 2AM his fingers come away wet. He tries to watch terrible late-night TV and thinks of the Powell Estate and tries to read the books stacked in the corner but it's a blend of actual history and dragons (which are no longer actual history) and it just confuses him because until yesterday he was sure he was the last one.  
  
 _Wonder what I'd be without you._  
  
Every time he's sure he's alone, someone always comes back for him. Every time he was exiled, on the run, running from the end of Gallifrey, the Master always came back. Better her than Rassilon, he supposes, but seeing Rassilon means he knows he can act without empathy or mercy (because Rassilon has no empathy and no mercy) and without the weight of 2000 years of history dragging him down into thinking they could still run together.  
  
His skin itches and burns and he remembers how powerful Time Lords and Time Ladies really are.  
  
When the sky begins to turn pink and orange outside he runs down to a newstand (he knows how to do this) and gathers the Times and the Mirror and seven financial newspapers and six kid-focused magazines and a comic book about pirates and leaves the Daily Mail and brings them back to the flat. He's accidentally deadlocked the door and can't make it open and with a sigh, sits with his back to it and waits for Clara to wake up. He could make her phone ring or her alarm blare to life but he'd fight the Cybermen again before waking her up from the mercy of black deep sleep on a day like this.  
  
He wants to check for Gallifrey but can't answer the question of did the Master love him enough to tell the truth or love him enough to stop him finding home again (because he always leaves he's always left he never wanted to be President).  
  
There's a small window at the end of the hall, and the day is turning out grey and dull and promising real wet water rain. He feels the pressure in the air against his dancing skin. At 8.35 he hears the thud of Clara's feet on the floor and feels rather than hears her low pitched moan when she thinks he's gone again. He leaps to his feet, the newspapers scattering and knock-knock-knock-knocks on the door, then swallows the rising bile and taps three more times, hating himself.  
  
"Clara, it's me," he says, so she knows it's not Danny (grief makes us want mad things), and she opens the door, bent backed and black-eyed and wearing Danny's jumper like a shroud. She looks at him like she's waiting for him to disappear, and when he doesn't and when he's gathered up the newspapers she hugs him with the papers crackling between them like a shield. He follows her into the flat and they make more tea and he paws through the newspapers and it's all conjecture and "were they the same metal men as the ghosts back in 2006" and no they weren't, it was all different back then. He was so young and joyous and thought a Gallifreyan-free future was possible and not a yawning black void. Clara sways in her seat and stares at her reflection in her mug, and mumbles something about her grandmother and dad coming over to sit with her later.  
  
"I'll leave when you ask," he says, staring at Garfield but not understanding it. "And I'll come back if you need me. Just call. Write. However you can."  
"What," says Clara, and draws breath, because even speaking with grief so fresh and raw is a marathon and he knows, and it's important. "What did you want to say to me about her. About…Missy."  
  
The Doctor looks at her and shame on you Doctor, because he feels tears prickling at the corners of his eyes and heat on his face, shame shame shame shame. He feels Gallifrey settle on his shoulders again like the rock of Sisyphus and he'll never be rid of it and he doesn't understand this stupid cartoon. He walks their earth and breathes their air and still he lets the Master get away and hopes beyond hope the Master managed to escape again  
  
 _(he knows what a transmat beam looks like and he knows what Cyberman laser fire looks like and he knows the difference and he knows the Master)_  
  
What he wants to say is this.  
  
"I'm sorry Clara, and I'm sorry, earth and vast swathes of the universe that have gone dark under the work of the Master and our games. And I'm sorry Chantho, and I'm sorry Nyssa, and I'm sorry Martha (you knew, didn't you, you saw everything that day) and Clara, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm ashamed. We were friends, and then we were in love, and then we were enemies but you can never stop loving someone who for so long was the second part of you always holding your hand always. Always. Playing the best friend to your enemy.  
  
It's different on Gallifrey, but that's not an excuse and I'm sorry, and I love the being but I hate the actions and she would still be the Master if she didn't murder and destroy and hurt people to hurt me. I still love her like I love all the others. I love him, and her, and all the iterations possible, because it's different on Gallifrey and it doesn't matter to us but it's the Master so it matters. I'm sorry and I don't know if she's actually dead, Clara and a part of me prays she isn't, and I want to go home and I don't know if it's there. Clara, I'm sorry, I want to go and I want to stay and I want to go home. Orange sky, red fields, white daisies, silver trees and the Master was there too, once. Screaming up at the sky.  
  
Love makes you do stupid things, and I've loved so many things and people and places and I've done so many stupid things, and yet, Clara, I don't think I would change it even if I could. Because the Master is defined by me and so much of me is defined by the Master and made by the Master and changed by the Master and the idea of living in a universe where I never had that is as unthinkable to me as living in a universe without having met you."  
  
 _Say something nice._  
  
What he says is this.  
   
 _Please_.  
  
"I'm sorry, Clara," and his voice breaks and she looks up, a startled deer in a dead man's jumper. "Oh, I'm so ashamed. And I'm a fool."  
"Oh," she says. And then, differently, "Oh." Understanding. "No."  
"I'm sorry," he says. "It's different on Gallifrey."  
She is silent.  
"It's different when you're the last."  
She is still.  
He is pathetic. He sighs, and she sips her tea. Pedestrian. Normal. Universe-shattering, fighting-across-the-stars, human love is what Clara has just lost, and he's talking about the Master.  
"It's no excuse," he says, and Clara sniffs.  
"You can't help who you love," she says, after endless seconds tick by.  
  
He makes her porridge and makes her eat three spoonfuls of it and waits for her to shower. He - the Doctor, husband of a maniac, former President of Earth, genocidaire of Gallifrey - washes up again, wipes down the countertops, charges Clara's phone and boils the kettle. The newspapers are stacked neatly, and he fixes the loose spring in the dishwasher. Danny was meant to do that, Clara had said.  
  
Danny won't get around to that.  
  
Clara reenters the kitchen, barefoot but dressed with dripping tangled hair, and because he's a granddad (so long ago) and a dad (so so long ago) he finds a towel and a comb. He helps her dry her hair and he combs it through while she sits quietly and stares into space. He doesn't think she'll want it backcombed and teased, but the parting is straight and true. If two of them stay like that a little longer than necessary, no one needs to know.  
  
"No one will ever believe you," he grumbles at one point, and she laughs. It comes out like a sob.  
  
Her family tells her they'll arrive in ten minutes and he says his goodbyes and there's an unnecessarily long but very necessary hug and he kisses her on top of the head because that's the right thing to do and tells her he'll be back if she needs him and then he goes.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
He goes-  
  
He doesn't have a family to comfort him anymore and he doesn't have a friend in the universe who could or should be weighed down with what he has to say, and he takes himself to the Eye of Orion and sits in the mist. He drinks in the blank white sky and rests his old hands on the old bricks and sits until his pants are soaked through from the damp grass and his hands and nose and toes are numb from the cold.  
  
He takes the TARDIS to the Medusa Cascade, the glorious scar in the universe that sings out with colour and memory and the Master was here too with him, when the Master was still Koschei and they were 90-year olds who really didn't know any better and it was less than twenty years later that they realised life would be so much more interesting if they spent less time running around in fields and more time lying down in them.  
  
He wouldn't tell Clara that for all the stars in the sky.  
  
 _You never would, you coward._  
  
The Doctor sits with his legs hanging out of the TARDIS and watches the deep black of the universe, and wonders if he wants Gallifrey to be there or not. Home is always nicer to think of with a veil of nostalgia draped over it. He wants Gallifrey before the war, before he left, before he was weighed down the with responsibility of a Time Lord and the honour and the ancients and always to look, never to touch, like the universe was a museum and they sat outside the glass case.  
  
 _You know the best part about knowing? Not telling you._  
  
He hears her voice, and he'll never know unless he tries, and no he didn't look after he'd met his tenth self and war self and tried to reverse the worse decision he'd ever had to make. Part of him had hoped he'd failed because how could he go back to Gallifrey after destroying it? Could he walk amongst the Time Lords and Ladies and have them look at him and know he was the committer of genocide and war crimes and the only survivor of the greatest war the universe had ever known?  
  
His palms sweat as he types in the coordinates, chills and tremors running through his body and he makes himself turn and walk and hopes and hopes and hopes she wouldn't hurt him and he hopes and hopes and hopes and he is mistaken.  
  
 _You win._  
  
It's the end of the war and the loss of Gallifrey all over again and she gave him hope and took it away and he loves a monster he's always loved a monster but it takes an idiot and a fool and a monster to love a monster back and here he is alone again in an old TARDIS, a stupid old man, alone again with nothing nothing nothing.  
  
 _(he's hitting the TARDIS as hard as he can, bruises blackening his skin and cuts splitting it open like paper, red red red oozing out and sparks flying)_  
  
He left the doors open. The cold black emptiness of space sucking at him and for a wild moment he thinks of stepping outside and shutting the doors behind him and seeing how long his respiratory bypass holds out before he-  
  
No.  
  
He turns and strides forward, he is the Doctor, and he reaches out to all of space to slam them shut and on the edge of hearing he hears the wheezing of another TARDIS and leans out desperately and -  
  
No. Stupid old man, mad old man, lonely old man.  
  
But alive. Alive old man, and he wants to stay that way and Clara will want him to stay that way, she has her family but she may need him some time in the future one day coming. He slams the TARDIS onto random and materialises somewhere else, warm, with a breathable atmosphere. Blood smears on the console and he looks at his breakable hands and retreats into the depths of the TARDIS to find something that needs fixing, helping, mending, distracting.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
 _You know the best part about knowing? Not telling you. (And she bites her lip like it's a game back on Gallifrey and she's hidden his particle physics essay and isn't going to give it back till they go look at the singing fish with Ushas and the others because come on Theta it's just a GAME-)_  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Weeks later for Clara and even later for him (because he kept looking, because he reversed the coordinates and ran them through codes, algorithms old as he and the Master and comes up blank space, black space, void, empty empty empty empty) he meets her in a cafe. He changes his jumper three times before coming inside, feels like she'd be able to smell the empty spaces and awful things he's found.  
  
She says she's found Danny, or Danny found her, and there's still something dark behind her eyes (trauma? truth? lies?) but he chooses to believe her and why would Danny want to meet him here anyway? But he's an old man and he's been a father and a grandfather and he knows when it's time to let live and let go.  
  
So he lies to her. He's found Gallifrey. It's not lost. It was right there, where he left it, funny how it's always in the last place you look (his hands still hurt, he still has a black and green bruise on his wrist) and man they're all happy skipping around maypoles, dancing in the moonlight.  
  
They welcomed him home (like he imagined) and there was Romana, and his family, and his children and grandchildren, and his friends and crowds of cheering people because he didn't kill them all, it was to end the war and somehow they just understood (but the Doctor doesn't get happy endings) and who could believe this fanciful story that they would welcome back the enactor of their deaths? And sure, why not, the Master was there, but before everything changed-  
  
And for a second, he lets himself believe the little game he's playing and his hands don't shake it all and his eyes only well up when Clara wraps her thin arms around his empty chest.  
  
 _You know who I am._

\---

 

He takes off in the TARDIS, the waltz of the carousel echoing in his ears and goes back to the empty space of Gallifrey and looks and really looks and says to the black,  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
No one replies, but it doesn't mean someone isn't listening.  
  
He knows what a transmat beam looks like and he knows what Cyberman laser fire looks like and he knows the difference and he knows the Master. He may not be the same as the Master, and he isn't a President and he never wanted to be an Officer, he wanted to make people better, but he also knows the Master didn't want to just rule, the Master wanted to learn, first, and be his match and his partner and his equal but something went so wrong along the way. He thinks of Clara, reunited with the one she thought dead, and hopefully finding happiness in the pieces.  
  
There's the blue flash - a transmat beam - behind him, burning bright in the blackness of space and the darkness of the TARDIS. The smell of displaced atoms and altered atmosphere. He doesn't turn around, still stares out at where Gallifrey should be. There's footsteps, high heels on the floor and the swish of a heavy skirt, and a hand on his shoulder and the Master will always smell the same no matter what, of ink and paper and smoke and ozone and coppery blood, and that's the smell of war to an Officer. His bruised hand reaches up and grasps the one on his shoulder like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.  
  
"UNIT thinks you're dead." he says.  
She doesn't say anything, just waits and judges and watches and almost tenderly twines their fingers together.  
"I don't think I could have done it anyway," he says, knowing it's not true.  
"We both know that's a lie," she replies, knowing it is.


End file.
